The nuclear power lobby asked the Donald Trump administration not to reinstate a utilities tax favored by the Barack Obama administration to cover a projected $20-billion shortfall for uranium-enrichment cleanup in Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee.
“The National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC), the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), and the Nuclear Waste Strategy Coalition (NWSC) would like to urge the administration not to include the reinstatement of a fee on utility customers to provide income for the Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning (D&D) Fund in the Department of Energy’s (DOE) fiscal year 2018 budget request,” the groups wrote in a May 1 letter published on NEI’s website Thursday.
In January, members of the Trump transition team, in the much-maligned memo to the Energy Department first reported by The New York Times, began grilling DOE officials about their plans to shore up the fund that pays for remediation of former uranium enrichment facilities at the agency’s Oak Ridge, Paducah, and Portsmouth sites.
The Obama administration’s plan was to create new mandatory spending for the cleanup that would be jump-started by tapping into a moribund $1.6 billion fund that paid for the operations of the former U.S. Enrichment Corp. Because mandatory spending must be offset with either new taxes or cuts elsewhere in the budget, the Obama administration proposed reinstating a tax on nuclear power: something industry has opposed on the grounds that utilities that used government-refined uranium have already paid billions of dollars for cleanup.
The GOP-controlled Congress refused the Obama administration’s request last year.
The Trump administration is expected to release its full fiscal 2018 budget request on May 22.
